LGB p. 201 #15 + question for 90%+ LG'ers Forum

[M.M.]

Powerscore's explanation says that template #2 is impossible to use because of the conditions of the question, which are:

"If in addition to the sales division one other division is toured on two consecutive days, then it could be true of the week's tour both that the"

Why is template 2 eliminated here?

I used the template to create the line:

P S S O O, which doesn't seem to break any rules, and fulfills the condition in the question stem, making answer A right.

What is wrong with this?


ALSO: In template 4, if SS is on Thursday and Friday, P will have to be on Monday since O can't go there, and wouldn't P have to go on Tuesday too, since if O was on Tuesday, P would have to go on Friday and P clearly can't go on Friday? Leaving the only place for O to go Wednesday?


Edit:
And for anyone who scores 90% of the questions right or more on LG: is it necessary to use "advanced techniques" to get no more than 3 wrong in the correct time on LG? I am pretty terrible at using these ...

[cahwc12]

your template breaks the last rule: O4 -> P5

I dug up LGB and blew the dust off my old LG booklet. This game took me 5:13, but I'm pretty sure it would be faster now since then I took time to write out a lot of unnecessary templates and contrapositives that I don't bother with now.


One thing I 100% advocate against is the use of templates, hypotheticals, contrapositives, and any other stuff you can doodle in the free space before you get to the questions. In all the games I've ever seen, there are only two I can think of where it would be beneficial to map out the templates beforehand, and even in those games it wouldn't save you that much time (and none of them have been in the 25 most recent PTs).

Honestly I would chuck that chapter of LGB and not worry about that strategy. It's far, far, far more likely to slow you down than to help you at all.


edit: and to answer your final question, there are definitely some very useful advanced techniques you can use on LG that will help you out. Scribbling extraneous or regurgitated information before going to the questions is not one of them, and labeling it "advanced" doesn't make it so.

[M.M.]

your template breaks the last rule: O4 -> P5

I dug up LGB and blew the dust off my old LG booklet. This game took me 5:13, but I'm pretty sure it would be faster now since then I took time to write out a lot of unnecessary templates and contrapositives that I don't bother with now.


One thing I 100% advocate against is the use of templates, hypotheticals, contrapositives, and any other stuff you can doodle in the free space before you get to the questions. In all the games I've ever seen, there are only two I can think of where it would be beneficial to map out the templates beforehand, and even in those games it wouldn't save you that much time (and none of them have been in the 25 most recent PTs).

Honestly I would chuck that chapter of LGB and not worry about that strategy. It's far, far, far more likely to slow you down than to help you at all.


edit: and to answer your final question, there are definitely some very useful advanced techniques you can use on LG that will help you out. Scribbling extraneous or regurgitated information before going to the questions is not one of them, and labeling it "advanced" doesn't make it so.

I thought the fourth rule was "If O is on TUESDAY" not Thursday

I even looked the rules over again (albeit quickly) and didn't see this.. >:[

On the bright side, your words of advice on chucking this chapter are MUCH appreciated. What type of advanced techniques are you referring to that are useful?

[Cerebro]

One thing I 100% advocate against is the use of templates, hypotheticals, contrapositives, and any other stuff you can doodle in the free space before you get to the questions. In all the games I've ever seen, there are only two I can think of where it would be beneficial to map out the templates beforehand, and even in those games it wouldn't save you that much time (and none of them have been in the 25 most recent PTs).

Honestly I would chuck that chapter of LGB and not worry about that strategy. It's far, far, far more likely to slow you down than to help you at all.

You didn't list which two would benefit from templates, but I'm wondering what approach you would take for a game such as PT 38, S2, Game #4 (qq. 20-24). The template seemed to help me somewhat, although tbh, I think my time this game can be improved... Is there a more optimal way to approach this game than to set up the 4 templates that can be inferred from rule #2? Usually I am able to answer the list questions very quickly, but with this game, because of the two instruments, I found my self getting bogged down evaluating the validity of the ordering of the last three pieces.

[NoodleyOne]

I personally find templates to be way too time consuming, and would probably be even more so on the newer LGs.

[05062014]

What are templates? I have been interested in an approach where I quickly jotted down the rules along side the "game stimulus" instead of down below and working on the questions sooner. My current method takes me over 30 minutes and occasionally it still gets tight at the end of the section. I wonder if this is because I get too comfortable and don't realize games are distributed such that finishing on time should not be a breeze, or, because my current method is not efficient enough.

Do any of you not write the rules out below? I find that the better I have gotten at games, the less I have found myself using a central diagram. Instead, I just scribble new mini diagrams for each question. Again, do some people know of a more efficient approach? There is still time for experimenting

[cahwc12]

One thing I 100% advocate against is the use of templates, hypotheticals, contrapositives, and any other stuff you can doodle in the free space before you get to the questions. In all the games I've ever seen, there are only two I can think of where it would be beneficial to map out the templates beforehand, and even in those games it wouldn't save you that much time (and none of them have been in the 25 most recent PTs).

Honestly I would chuck that chapter of LGB and not worry about that strategy. It's far, far, far more likely to slow you down than to help you at all.

You didn't list which two would benefit from templates, but I'm wondering what approach you would take for a game such as PT 38, S2, Game #4 (qq. 20-24). The template seemed to help me somewhat, although tbh, I think my time this game can be improved... Is there a more optimal way to approach this game than to set up the 4 templates that can be inferred from rule #2? Usually I am able to answer the list questions very quickly, but with this game, because of the two instruments, I found my self getting bogged down evaluating the validity of the ordering of the last three pieces.

Okay, even when I would do templates originally, I would never do them for anything over 3, and usually not anything over 2. 4 is way too much. Here's what a diagram should look like:

G/L __ __ __ __ G/L

That's just my main diagram and is plenty enough to work with for most of the game (as per the "advanced techniques" I was referring to earlier, here's a fine example--if you're given three variables and told that one of them, F, cannot be first or last, it's better to represent that rule in terms of the remaining two that CAN exist, G and L).

I only made two hypotheticals for the entire 6 questions in this game and solved it in 5:52. I don't think that's an especially quick time, but I can't imagine spending upwards of an extra 30-45 seconds (or more) on initial templates would have helped the cause here. In fact, if you take a closer look at the questions, it's never important to discern any of those four templates from each other. Merely knowing that only G/L can be first and last is enough.

What are templates? I have been interested in an approach where I quickly jotted down the rules along side the "game stimulus" instead of down below and working on the questions sooner. My current method takes me over 30 minutes and occasionally it still gets tight at the end of the section. I wonder if this is because I get too comfortable and don't realize games are distributed such that finishing on time should not be a breeze, or, because my current method is not efficient enough.

Do any of you not write the rules out below? I find that the better I have gotten at games, the less I have found myself using a central diagram. Instead, I just scribble new mini diagrams for each question. Again, do some people know of a more efficient approach? There is still time for experimenting

The general rule I work by is "if it feels slow, it is slow." If it seems like you're taking the path of least resistance and ending up at 30+ minutes, I don't see a problem with it. I think most of the newest games sections I finish with around 5 minutes to spare. In June I think I had 7-8 minutes leftover from the experimental LG and about 5 minutes leftover from the real section (would probably have had closer to 7-8 minutes if not for #17, which I spent close to 8-10 minutes on overall before it was thrown out).

I don't use a central diagram all that much, but it's something I would never remove from the game. Even if I never refer to it again, I need to create it while I read the stimulus in order to formulate the game in my head. From there I'll generally just produce a bunch of mini-diagrams, but I like to work from a pre-existing framework. By "extra doodling" I mean things beyond that initial, central diagram. I'm an advocate of writing only what you must and then maximizing time spent on the questions.

[Cerebro]

One thing I 100% advocate against is the use of templates, hypotheticals, contrapositives, and any other stuff you can doodle in the free space before you get to the questions. In all the games I've ever seen, there are only two I can think of where it would be beneficial to map out the templates beforehand, and even in those games it wouldn't save you that much time (and none of them have been in the 25 most recent PTs).

Honestly I would chuck that chapter of LGB and not worry about that strategy. It's far, far, far more likely to slow you down than to help you at all.

You didn't list which two would benefit from templates, but I'm wondering what approach you would take for a game such as PT 38, S2, Game #4 (qq. 20-24). The template seemed to help me somewhat, although tbh, I think my time this game can be improved... Is there a more optimal way to approach this game than to set up the 4 templates that can be inferred from rule #2? Usually I am able to answer the list questions very quickly, but with this game, because of the two instruments, I found my self getting bogged down evaluating the validity of the ordering of the last three pieces.

Okay, even when I would do templates originally, I would never do them for anything over 3, and usually not anything over 2. 4 is way too much. Here's what a diagram should look like:

G/L __ __ __ __ G/L

That's just my main diagram and is plenty enough to work with for most of the game (as per the "advanced techniques" I was referring to earlier, here's a fine example--if you're given three variables and told that one of them, F, cannot be first or last, it's better to represent that rule in terms of the remaining two that CAN exist, G and L).

Thanks, but I was asking about Game #4, not Game #2. Game #4 is the one that talks about 5 musical pieces, each played with two instruments.

[cahwc12]

Ah, had just woken up and misread!

I first did this game in 9:26 and went -1 (maybe in january), but I just redid it in about 5 minutes and think I could have probably done it faster.

It seems to me there are much more than four scenarios here (unless you're just happy filling in only 2/5 variables).

Doing this now, I'd just write:

__ N/T __ __ __

N O S T V
F H G F L
L M H G M


In looking at the questions:

20 is just your average rules check.
21 can be solved by rule 2 (N/T must be 2nd, so 3 and 4 cannot share F).
22 I would have just skipped and then brute forced this question, but since (A) is correct, it didn't go far. (A) takes a bit to confirm, but the rest are quick to eliminate.
23 plays on rule 2 again.
24 plays on rule 2, but I would brute force it with a double hypo.

You only need three diagrams to solve this game, so I don't really see why writing out four incomplete templates beforehand would benefit you at all. This is a case where you might feel good about yourself because you've just done a lot of work and deduced some cool findings, but suddenly 2-3 minutes have gone by and you're not even on the questions.

The reason this game took so long for me when I first did it was because I spent a long time diagramming rule implications of the stimulus and converting them to blocs. That's a time investment that didn't pay off (and it almost never does--I couldn't even find the definite example of templates helping that I remembered.. something to do with numbers as variables, maybe the one about paying bills).

So, to answer your question more succinctly, yes I think a more optimal way to approach this game would be to not set up templates, and instead just go into the questions after writing out the information given in the stimulus (~40 seconds vs 3 minutes). As it turned out in this game, at least one of those templates would not have been useful.